Community as Church, Church as Community

By Michael Plekon and Jason Byassee

Parishes of all denominations are in decline, shrinking, closing, dying. We know that there are increasing numbers, young and older, who are religious "nones" and "dones." This book explores why the decline is taking place, why the distancing is going on. But it goes on to examine parishes from all over the country and from various church bodies that are resurrecting. The central theme of death and resurrection shapes the analysis of parishes covered. Parishes are resurrecting by reinventing their ministries, by repurposing their building to better serve their neighborhoods, thus replanting and reconnecting with them. All of this is the Spirit's doing but through the community of sisters and brothers who make up each congregation of faith. Community as the core of church is the other reality shaping the book's reflection. And community, a parish being with those around, living for more than its own survival are visions for going forward. Other aspects of congregational life are also examined, most importantly the pastors--how they serve when budgets shrink, how they are trained, how pastors act with the community not above it. No recipes are suggested for parish resurrection, but the stories of the parishes that have revived bear within numerous lessons for us in the future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Jul 22, 2021
• ISBN: 9781725287556

Michael Plekon

Michael Plekon is professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and in the Program in Religion and Culture at Baruch College of the City University of New York. He is also an ordained priest in the Orthodox Church in America and the author or editor of a number of books, including Hidden Holiness and Saints As They Really Are: Voices of Holiness in Our Time, both published by the University of Notre Dame Press.

Book preview

Introduction: Meal for Sinners

An Image of Communion, Community, and Church

On the cover of this book is a painting completed by Fr. Sieger Köder. A priest and artist, he was born in Wasseralfingen in Swabia in 1925 and died in Ellwangen in 2015, having just turned ninety. During World War II, Fr. Köder was a prisoner of war. After the war, he took part in the Catholic renewal movement for Germany. His education was as a silversmith and painter, and he was also a high school teacher of the arts. Later in life he did seminary work, and in 1971 was ordained. He was a parish pastor alongside his painting and designs for stained glass, found in many churches, both in Germany and across Europe.

Fr. Köder was daring in his use of color and in the figures used for depicting scenes from Jesus’ life. One can clearly see the influence of Marc Chagall and perhaps also Emil Nolde on his work, both in the boldness of depiction of persons of faith, as well as the powerful color. Köder’s paintings are forceful proclamations of the word, bold imaginations of how Jesus lovingly but defiantly took the side of the marginalized, the outcasts of his society and tradition. In many of his works, the well-known scene turns into a challenge as well as a provocative confession of faith, the gospel in color. The painting on the cover of this book he did in 1973 for the Germanicum, the seminary for German students in Rome. Actually it was for the refectory of their house outside Rome, Villa San Pastore—or the House of the Good Shepherd. The title is Das Mahl der Sünder, the meal or supper of sinners.

It is the last supper, but instead of the twelve disciples usually depicted gathered with Jesus at table, here we have seven persons, three women and four men. We see the bread and cup of wine in the hands of the unseen host, Jesus, with other cups and pieces of bread in the hands of the guests and on the table. Jesus’ hands are stretched out with the bread and cup, offering these to the guests, Jesus’ friends, Jesus’ community, Jesus’ church. That is what this book is about.

From the marks of the nails in Jesus’ hands we could take this to be the risen Lord but he is not reappearing to his confused, grieving disciples in first-century CE Jerusalem. Out the window to the right is the nearby town, Gallicano, the Villa San Pastore being located just outside the village. On the pathway up to the house are rocks, stones on which to stumble. The path is not smooth. What comes from being at this meal is not easy. This supper of the Lord is not yesterday in the distant past but right here and now. Jesus offers the bread and cup of himself in communion to these friends, but who are they?

Starting on the right is an African man, his arm bandaged, blood stains on what could be prisoners’ clothing. Does he represent those oppressed in the developing countries, those who are the victims of racism and hatred, people caught in power struggles or condemned and tortured because they fought for justice?

Next is a well-dressed woman, likely upper class. Perhaps she has a country estate nearby. She is one who in looking round the table is shocked and maybe even frightened by her fellow guests. She has nothing in common with them in terms of income or dress or education or ethnicity. Yet there she is, invited to the feast, sitting along with them. The bread and cup are extended to her. She is a sister of them all.

On her right is an intense, bespectacled young man. Is he an artist, a writer, a political activist, a student, or a protestor? Is he one of those reviled today as radical leftists, thugs, one of those who only finds fault with and hates his country? Does he too wonder why he is here, since he is done with religion? As for church, he belongs to none. Likely he too is bewildered at being invited to this group.

The clown appears in many of Köder’s paintings. The clown is here too, in the classical sense of the one whose mask signals laughter but covers over tragedy and sadness. The clown is the one who can poke fun at the high and mighty, as in the song of Mary, the Magnificat. The clown reminds us that all the emblems of power and beauty are fleeting, temporary, incapable of bringing peace. Only compassion can do that and the clown does no harm to anyone.

Bent over, possibly trying to hear the words of the host about the bread and cup and what they are is an old woman, poor, likely handicapped in some way, and surely poor. She may not have a home except what she can find in the streets among other homeless folk. She has only what she can beg and scavenge, but here she is, invited to a feast, with the bread of life and cup of salvation, with more than enough to sustain her.

And her dining companion is the woman in red, made up, almost too pretty, like so many sex workers along the road out here in Rome and on the streets of every city. She offers sex for pay, her body the only commodity she has to sell in order to support herself and likely children or parents or siblings. She would never be invited to a wealthy person’s home except for—her wares. But she is a welcome guest here. And her clutching her cup to her chest says she is deeply moved by what the host is saying and offering, boundless love.

Lastly we encounter a face full of longing, searching passion, even pain. Someone who has suffered for truth. Perhaps a rabbi or pastor, or a poet or writer, but most likely a seeker. He is the only one grasping his piece of bread and cup with intensity. He seems to know it is a meal that will sustain him, a new life.

We do not read only suffering and need in the faces. Somehow by being invited as guests, they are becoming a community, a household, the people of God. The host, Jesus, looks at them with forgiveness, not judgment. His face is reflected in their faces and perhaps a little in the cup of wine he extends to them. This is the house of love and service. All are sisters and brothers. Maybe we would not invite such people to our homes, but as in the parables of great feasts, Jesus tells us that this is what it looks like to follow after him. This is what church is—communion, community with Jesus and with each other. On the back wall of the room where the guests are seated are the outlines of another parable: the loving Father and the lost prodigal son. The parable confirms what the table is all about, community as church, church as community. And the force of Fr. Köder’s image becomes even clearer when one knows where the painting, a massive one too, is located. It hangs in the dining room of a seminary where future priests and their teachers share the table beneath it.

There is a place for us at this table, as in the great icon of the Trinity by Andrei Rublev. But where will you sit? Where will I sit? Wherever that is, it will be in community, in church, with sisters and brothers and the Lord.¹

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. For this reflection, I am indebted to the meditation on this painting of Fr. Köder by Fr. Pius Kirchgessner, https://www.pius-kirchgessner.de/

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Chapter 1

Community and Church, Church and Community

The church is the communion of the whole world.

¹

First, Church

One has to start with Jesus in talking about the church. This goes without saying. Or does it? I myself have heard others balk at being asked what Jesus might say about a particular church situation. Don’t bring him into it. This is about the chain of command, the rules, tradition.

I think Rowan Williams knows something about Jesus and the church. A priest for over forty years, almost thirty years a bishop, formerly archbishop of Canterbury and leader of the world Anglican Communion, a prolific writer and professor at both Oxford and Cambridge, one suspects he knows a bit about both Jesus and the church.

Williams has a striking description of how all we know and can say about Jesus comes into being. This is talk about Christ, Christology being the technical term. What we know of Jesus is by no means just the product and preserve of academic specialists—theologians, in their books, papers, and lectures. At the end of a challenging study about what we can know and say about Christ, Williams is suddenly clear and simple.

Forget all the schools of thought and doctrines of the past two thousand years. Williams places us right in the midst of a community on a Sunday morning. People are singing, praying, listening to the Scriptures being read; they are gathered around the bread and cup and then carrying what they receive into their homes, schools, workplaces, everywhere, in everyday life.

All that can be said about Jesus is embodied by the community who continue to follow after him:

Christology, in short, is done by the Church; it is done in the practice of a community that understands itself to be the Body of Christ, a group of persons living and acting from the conviction that human community is most fully realized in the unconditional mutuality which is represented by the language of organic interdependence. Christology is done in the practice of lives that embrace their finitude and materiality without fear, lives that enact the divine self-identification with those who endure loss, pain, and contempt. Christology is done in a practice of prayer and worship that does not approach God as a distant and distinct individual with a will to which mine must conform—as if in a finite relation of slave to master—but acts out of the recognition of adoptive filiation and the intimacy that flows from this. It is done when we see that the doing of God’s will in earth as in Heaven means that the eternal will of God is for the life of the world—that God is satisfied when our flourishing is secured.²

In other words, if you want to know who Jesus is, anything important about him, go listen to and go look at those who follow him. They will either tell you all you want to know—or send you running as far away from them (and Jesus) as you can get.

At a time when so many congregations are challenged by decline, shrinkage, and the difficulty of attracting and keeping members, is there a good reason for a book about church?

The point of all that follows here can be put very succinctly.

While church is many things—and community, likewise, includes a great deal—church is essentially the communal experience of God and each other and the area. Church is the household or family of faith: those who are the people of God. And then, the communication and actions of God and God’s people.

Or, the church is best defined as community. Hence the title of this book. We know that church entails community, but I want to argue that church is best understood as a communal reality, as community.

The Rediscovery of Church

Religion has been defined as something an individual believes and practices. Accent individual. Alfred North Whitehead put it this way: Religion is what an individual does with his solitariness.³ Belief, often described as adherence to various doctrines or teachings, is the very heart of religion. But such an individual focus ignores most of what passes for religion, what is visible, namely ritual, sacred texts, places, and feasts, not to mention rules and histories of important figures and events. In other words, religion is far from an individual pursuit but inherently communal, shared, touching every aspect of life from the economy and political order to food and family, marriage, sexuality, and of course birth and death.

It might seem peculiar that with church being such a common expression of public and group religiosity that somehow the communal core would have been eclipsed or forgotten. Yet many agree that there was a profound and transforming rediscovery of the church in the last century. The appearance of the ecumenical movement, early in the twentieth century, due to many clashes of churches in missionary efforts, is seen as a crucial impetus for reflecting on what divides and what unites Christians.

Looking back, it is clear that the ecumenical meetings held in Edinburgh in 1927 and Lausanne in 1937 and which led to the formation of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in 1948 were more than academic gatherings. In these meetings, there were powerful experiences of other Christians as sisters and brothers. Old stereotypes and divisions had obscured much of the faith that was still held in common. The sheer diversity of these gatherings, including for the first time many of the Eastern churches, was also a recognition of the global expanse of the gospel, moreover its inculturation in a stunning array of languages, music, liturgies, art, and customs. Instead of being divided Christians, disciples of Jesus began to experience that they were all one in the Lord and in the church.

In subsequent decades, the liturgical movement and the broader return to the sources (ressourcement) of the liturgy, Scriptures, early Christian writers, and saints was also part of the rediscovery of the church. This is not the church of canon law or the church of bishops or that even of dogma and doctrine. Rather it is the ancient, scriptural sense of church as the people of God, as a communion or community rooted in baptism that does not simply wash away the sin of each individual but reveals all as sisters and brothers in the Lord. Nicholas Afanasiev described this as eucharistic ecclesiology. Thus, the eucharist makes the church and the church makes the eucharist, as Henri de Lubac put it. The church and eucharist are the gathering and action of all.⁴

Rediscovery of the Church in the Early Church

Nicholas Afanasiev (1893–1966) was a specialist in the church councils and the canons or rulings they issued. He also studied the liturgical rites and history of the church as well as the New Testament and early church writings of the apostolic and patristic periods. He was a renaissance scholar, an expert in so many areas. In his major study, he returned to the church of the first few centuries in order to establish the essential components of the Christian community. While even into the twentieth century, in both the Western and Eastern churches, the church was defined in terms of the councils, the canons, the bishops, and the church’s organizational, that is, institutional structures, Afanasiev took a more basic approach. It was one that had been promoted by an ecumenical array of scholars from the late-nineteenth into the twentieth centuries, many of these being students of the liturgy, its origins, and development. Variously known as nouvelle théologie or the ressourcement movement, it included renowned figures such as Yves Congar, Henri de Lubac, Jean Daniélou, Louis Bouyer, and Hans Urs von Balthasar, to name a few.

Afanasiev, following the Acts of the Apostles, the apostolic letters, and the postapostolic writings, rediscovered the church as community. He saw the church not essentially in the great patriarchates and state-derived apparatus of dioceses and provinces but in the local assembly, the community of baptized believers. The gathering, the assembly of the people of God, defines and expresses what the church is. The people gathered around the table of the Lord. They were united in prayer, the reading and preaching of the Scriptures, in giving thanks, in the breaking of the bread and the sharing of it and the cup. This was not only a cultic gathering but a community which in turn spread their good news and engaged in the doing of works of lovingkindness.

Afanasiev stresses that by baptism there was a consecration of the faithful, the laity, to be prophets, priests, and kings. There was no original separation of priests and laity. The community identified leaders from their number, set them apart, and ordained them. These eventually became the ministries of bishop, presbyter, and deacon. The chosen and consecrated leaders remained members of the community and the relationships were ones of reciprocal love and service. At the conclusion of the first volume, The Church of the Holy Spirit, Afanasiev makes a forceful claim that the only power or rule in the church is that of love, not law (vlast’ lyubvi). Later, law emerged as the framework of the church’s structure and life. What had originally been a sacred community became divided into those with sacred characteristics due to ordination, the leaders of the church. Below them, inferior to them, subordinate as well to them, were the former priesthood of the baptized, the laity (laikoi) Afanasiev describes. To be a lay person or laic, as Afanasiev puts it, is not merely to be nonordained. The laity are the general priesthood of the church, the bishops, presbyters, and deacons called out from among them and set apart for specific ministries. Every Christian has a ministry.

There were important local variations, and in these early centuries as yet neither a clerical caste nor the dominance of law was universal. Though convoked by imperial decree, the ultimate authority was the council, where bishops as well as clergy and lay people convened to make decisions for the church, both doctrine and practice. In time, both clericalism and law would reshape the churches. Afanasiev said he had only uncovered the original eucharistic ecclesiology, the communal and sacramental pattern of the early church and the realization that the church was not its rules or law, not the hierarchy of its ordained leaders or the monastics, not even just the details of worship or the sacred texts or great witnesses, but persons of faith. The church was all of these, since it was a body, the body of Christ, a communion (koinonia), a community in communion with the Lord and with each other and the world. In New Testament terms, the only law in the church was that of the new commandment, to love one another.

Toward the Church and the Parishes of Today

As we proceed here, I believe it will become clear that what Rowan Williams and Nicholas Afanasiev set before us are far from being just academic visions of the church. Already, their concentration on the communal nature of church, the concrete local church in the parish, the shared nature of worship, witness, and service—these are the essential elements of a congregation, the ways in which a community of faith gathers and then reaches out to the world around.

In reviewing Afanasiev’s vision, we have the fundamental components of the life of every congregation, those in the early church as well as today. Diana Butler Bass noted the leading characteristics of vital parishes in a book based on a Lilly endowment project on Congregations of Intentional Practice, conducted from 2002 to 2005. Looking for congregations that seemed to have found ways to renew themselves and speak to the world, she inventoried several ways in which this vitality was manifest.⁵ Vital parishes and communities of faith showed hospitality not only to those visiting on Sunday who could be prospective members. They considered themselves to be part of the surrounding neighborhood and its people, part of the world they were to love and serve. Such parishes were places of healing, discernment, and diversity. They were supporters of justice in their larger areas, aware that their efforts in helping to feed, clothe, shelter, and protect those in need was the most powerful witness to Christ they could offer. Their sacred space and their worship were beautiful, able to sustain the transformation that is the life of the people of God. Parishes were doorways into the kingdom.

Another way of looking at these markers of renewal and faith was to say that a community is a fellowship of prayer, study, service, and connection to others—all the other detailed aspects being included. Contrary to critics who would fault him for concentrating on the eucharist, or on fellowship, or neglecting the distinctive place of the ordained, Afanasiev observes that in the early church, the local assembly incorporated all of the aspects just mentioned. The local church was not just a place of cult, like the temples in the Roman empire. There were living communities of women and men who continued to carry their faith into the neighborhoods in which they lived and worked. They reached out in charity to assist not only their members but others in need. They were not administered top-down, by the clergy, as in later centuries, but in a conciliar, communal manner.

I raise the salience of these basic characteristics of not just the ancient church but also the congregation now very deliberately. As we look at many examples of parishes that face the demographic and other changes of the twenty-first century in this book, it is striking how those that find a way to continue, no matter the form, to revive, resurrect, and reinvent themselves will have these elements as the components of their koinonia, their community, which is the heart of everything being looked at here. As the pastor of one of the parishes I know in-depth told me, there is no magic, no recipe, no tricks, no manual to follow, and it is surely not the accomplishment of the pastor alone—it is the resurrection of the life of the body of Christ, the people of God, the community of faith in a particular place.

Far from being a curious theological detour, Afanasiev’s vision had already been seen and enacted at least in its documents by the reforming Moscow council of 1917–18. Like some early councils, it brought together not just the bishops, but also the clergy, monastics, and laity. Hyacinthe Destivelle brilliantly describes how all sorts of traditional versus progressive impasses and clergy-laity conflicts were transcended by conciliar structure and procedure. Despite his reservations about some aspects of this council, I believe it was part of the impetus for Afanasiev’s conviction, at the start of his scholarly life, that the church was essentially a community—something, of course, clearly there in the New Testament. His research while still at the university in Belgrade, under the supervision of Russian historian A. P. Dobroklonsky, rooted him in the communal nature of the church, whether at the level of the councils or that of the local church, the parish. Marianne Afanasiev, his wife, detailed the genesis, as she calls it, of his vision of the church as a community, a eucharistic one, that is, shaped by both baptism and the gathering around the eucharistic table.⁶ Much of this came from his own experience, as a parish priest in Bizerte, Tunisia, during WWII. He was known and loved as a pastor, a spiritual leader, and not just by his tiny Orthodox community but by other Christians and Muslims. His own pastoral experience connected him with the church of the first centuries, ecclesiology in action, incarnate. The other principal inspiration for Afanasiev’s thinking was the greatest Orthodox theologian of the twentieth century, Fr. Sergius Bulgakov, dean of St. Sergius Institute. Bulgakov also rediscovered the eucharistic core of the church as well as the eschatological dimension, that is, the church as the experience of the kingdom here and now and a foretaste of the age to come.⁷

The local communities continued the patterns established by the apostles and earliest missionary disciples. Only much later did church and empire merge—the church of the Byzantine and the Roman courts becoming the great churches of East and West, and the churches of smaller local and national territories and peoples. It is not surprising that Afanasiev’s work was the only piece of Eastern Orthodox scholarship cited in the study documents of Vatican II. That council’s dogmatic constitution on the church, Lumen gentium, reflects the eucharistic ecclesiology Afanasiev revealed from the church’s first four centuries. Later on, others would also emphasize such an ecclesiology. In the Western church, Tillard and others focused on a communion of communions.⁸ Zizioulas, while criticizing some of what he believed were Afanasiev’s claims, also envisioned a eucharistic ecclesiology.⁹ Despite what some critics say, Afanasiev never reduced the church to the celebration of the eucharist. Neither did he neglect the importance of the assembly’s consecrated leaders nor diminish the fundamental place of baptism—all of which are covered in The Church of the Holy Spirit.

More recently, Cyril Hovorun has presented a critical vision of how church structures have developed over the centuries, usually under state/political and social influence, not just theological impetus.¹⁰ Hovorun brilliantly sketches the ever-developing institutional frameworks that called themselves church. Rather, the perspectives church leaders showcase are often legitimations for political positions and state policies. He provides ample illustrations from the past as well as from the Russian Orthodox vision of a Russian world (russkiy mir) in our time. The large, amply funded church networks of today are far cries from the small, loosely organized churches that met in the houses of Andronicus and Junia, Aquila and Priscilla and Lydia, in the locales of Thessalonica, Corinth, Ephesus, Colossae, and Galatia.

All too often, we think we know what the authentic church was, the primitive church of the apostles and their immediate successors. Reformation church Christians in particular have believed that stripping away what seem to them to be the accretions, the merely human traditions, of the past two thousand years, will bring us right back to the purity of the Acts of the Apostles and the communities planted by Paul and other apostolic wanderers. Even there, as Raymond Brown pointed out some time ago, the churches the apostles left behind were diverse in structure, self-understanding, and more often than not in conflict with their founders or with each other.¹¹ Hovorun and, in a more epic manner, Diarmaid MacCulloch force us to accept that the church has been just about whatever emperors or bishops, kings and mystics and theological intellects, not to mention fanatics as well as rank-and-file members wanted it to be.¹² Aidan Kavanagh created the famous Mrs. Murphy in his vision of liturgy as the first theology (theologia prima). She is the devout if not learned soul in the pew who knows what she believes and thus can tell truth from fraud in the liturgy, in the clergy, and in all that can be called church.¹³

Even now, after the Reformation, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, and the nuclear era, the question of how the church is best defined and described continues to produce disagreement. A half century after Vatican II there is a strong and often vocal movement across some of the churches away from a communion or conciliar model to an essentially hierarchical one, a very top-down arrangement with bishops at the top, laity all the way down at the bottom—a pyramid often the best model. One also continues to see splintering of church bodies among the Anglicans, Lutherans, and Methodists, usually over conflict issues such as the status of LGBTQ people, their ability to be members or marry in religious services. But conflicts also have resulted in new divisions over the ordination of women as well as alleged deviations from historical church teaching on Christ, on the unique status of Christianity. In other church bodies, political positions unify as well as divide: the evangelicals are currently experiencing conflict within themselves on where they stand in an America under Trump.

The church may insist it remains in an unbroken connection with Christ and the community of disciples who followed him, continuing his presence and work after his departure. Whether one leans on the apostolic succession of ordained ministers, whether they are called bishops, presbyters/elders/priests and deacons or other names, or whether, as in recent ecumenical documents, one speaks of a broader tradition passed on—the apostolic continuity of ministers, Scriptures, baptism, eucharist, and other sacramental actions, church historians and students of liturgy recognize that just as now, so also in the first centuries, diversity accompanied unity. And, as will be seen within this book, older models of the local church or parish no longer are sustainable. New forms, reinventions, adaptations, and more have been discovered and implemented.

But looking too intensely at the church and its structures risks forgetting or minimizing the world in which it has always existed. Hovorun’s efforts as well as those of others like MacCulloch constantly keep in focus the kind of state, economy, society in which churches live, and the symbiotic relations between church and world. In what follows here, the focus will move back and forth between church and world but will remain on community, as a gathering that people both want and need.

But there will be a particular vantage point at work. This is the shrinkage, the decline in membership and thus in financial support and in activities of parishes of all church bodies here in America in the past decades. This trend seems to be continuing now and into the forseeable future. As will be noted, the reasons why parishes are changing dramatically are many and complex. The conviction that the shrinkage is due primarily to lack of belief could be argued from ongoing research that shows the number of nonparticipating, also nonbelieving Americans, is growing, and not only among those under forty years of age. In the course of this book, there will be a look at the reasons. But the primary claim I want to make here is that for all the change, church is one of the increasingly rare locations for the experience of community, and community in a number of different ways.

Community

Community, it seems, is everywhere—and nowhere. There have never been more networks linking people together. But we often seem to be alone on our phones, or in our ever-longer workdays, or miles away from family. However, it would be an exaggeration to claim we are all lonely and yearning for togetherness. Some of us have more than enough of the other, always on call by management or by our own devices. And the pressure to belong, to conform, to be constantly scrutinized—these are bits of the past we are happy to lack.

American philosopher Josiah Royce has been called the voice of connection and binding and even before Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of the beloved community crucial to our existence. Royce was singular among American writers of the nineteenth century in celebrating our nature as creatures who craved community because we were social beings.¹⁴

Robert Putnam, on the other hand, is but one of a number who see it differently.¹⁵ He has argued that many of the ways in which we connected to neighbors and friends have disappeared or become much weaker. Bowling leagues and local teams are replaced by intense sports programs for our kids. The town and school networks that supported athletic teams and scholarships are not always there anymore. Many parents find fundraising is now the new normal for uniforms, transportation, and other parts of sports and band and the arts in their children’s lives. The ability to travel and select where we spend free time has made neighborhood haunts like taverns and restaurants less likely to be where our gang regularly congregates.

However, his studies over the last two decades keep turning up examples where frayed, torn community is restored, made whole and vital again. There are no surprises about how this occurs. It is through coalitions for educational betterment, through unions, associations of healthcare professionals and librarians, and yes, even sometimes through local politicians. And omnipresent in the restoration and maintenance of community are churches, synagogues, masjids, and the communities within these and across the lines of faith communities for local needs such as food, housing, legal aid, childcare, and better schools.

As we will see later, many observers and students of communities of faith note the profound demographic changes, also the economic and political shifts in our time that have left overwhelmingly negative impacts on membership and participation in congregations. Looking back at decades of data, Mark Chaves says one can only read the trends of the last fifty years for religious congregations as decline. And it is not surprising for American problem-solvers and their ingenuity that the number of efforts to reinvent one’s community, to find different ways of being a parish, are many and diverse. Later chapters will look at a selection of these.¹⁶

But while many students of American religion see decline, others also detect persistence if not some vitality and growth. My teacher, Peter Berger, after years of watching Western societies become more secularized, and interpreting this in a larger theory of secularization, eventually changed his mind.¹⁷ This was based on a number of countertrends and instances. A principal one was the work of scholars who show just such persistence and even expansion, not only among Muslims but among Christians and in all kinds of different locations internationally. One of these scholars, Nancy Ammerman, has, with her associates, tracked the dynamism of congregations and the presence of faith not just on Sunday and feast day services but in every activity.¹⁸ Others, like Sally K. Gallagher, Nicholas Denysenko, and Ricky Manolo, have examined the tenacity of religious belonging in their observations of individual communities.¹⁹ They have also shown that communities of faith, even when faced with decline, have been able to find ways